As a young teen, I recall vividly the scene around our dinner table at home, munching on my Mom’s wonderful cooking while listening to Walter Cronkite (CBS) or John Chancellor (NBC) detail the day’s casualty figures from Vietnam.  Phrases like, “losses were light “, or “ground was gained at modest cost”  were commonplace, and after a while, no one seemed to blink an eye.   Other than a few hippies, and sporadic college campus protests, the horrors of war became accepted;  the terrible evils that man is capable of ceased to really trouble us.   And the bottom line was that no one around the world, other than America, was doing anything to combat the horrors of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam or Pol Pot in Cambodia.   Perhaps we can blame the absence of CNN and Fox News for our apathy, but then again, we did have Walter Cronkite speaking to us at our dinner tables each night.

Is that scenario above much different than today’s growing indifference and acceptance of random acts of terror perpetrated by Islamic extremists around the world ?   After a few days, memories and mention of San Bernadino and Paris and Fort Hood and Burkina Faso and Westgate Shopping Mall in Kenya fade away from national awareness and discussion.  And soon, the Wisconsin presidential primary will push the atrocities committed at the Brussels airport this week  to the backburner of news reporting.   And this is in a world of instant social media and immediate on-the-ground press coverage.

But unlike the late-1960’s,  America is not at the forefront of combatting the pure evil that threatens the civilized world, preferring instead to be isolationist and tolerant and politically correct toward the instruments of that evil.   “After all, it’s only a small 10% minority that is manipulating the faith for destructive purposes”.   Well folks, 10% of 1.5 billion folks is 150 million very dangerous, radicalized folks.

I don’t have a really grand or profound point or conclusion to this reminiscing about my youth,  other than to wish and hope and pray for the next American president to once again lead and motivate our civilized partners, and even some of our less civilized partners (Russia), in an effort to confront and combat the evils we view on the tube and on our computers each day.   If not America, then who ?                                               WHAT THE HECK !